Drone Mainboard vs Flight Controller PCB: What Is the Difference? Two Boards with Very Different Jobs In a drone the electronics are usually split between a flight controller and a mainboard, and the two are designed with opposite priorities. The flight controller exists to keep the aircraft stable, which means…

PCB Assembly vs Box Build: What Is the Difference? Two Levels of Service PCB assembly and box build are often quoted together, but they describe different scopes of work. PCB assembly produces a populated circuit board. Box build takes that board, or several of them, and turns it into a…

BT Resin vs ABF Substrate: Materials Compared Two Names, Two Different Things BT resin and ABF are often compared as if they were competing substrate materials, but they play different roles. BT resin is a core material, the rigid sheet that gives a substrate its mechanical backbone. ABF, which stands…

IC Substrate vs PCB: Structure, Materials and Manufacturing Two Boards, Two Jobs An IC substrate and a printed circuit board look similar from a distance: both are laminates with copper layers, vias and solder resist. In practice they operate at completely different scales. A PCB carries components between one another…

PCB Teardrops: Complete Guide to Design and Benefits What a Teardrop Is A teardrop is a small fillet of copper that widens the junction where a trace meets a pad or a via. Instead of a trace of constant width arriving at a round pad at a sharp angle, the…

Smart Speaker PCB: Design, Cost and Manufacturing Guide What the Board Has to Do A smart speaker packs a surprising amount of conflicting electronics into a small space. It has a processor running voice recognition, an array of microphones listening for a wake word, a class D amplifier driving a…

Access Control System PCB: Prototype and Volume Cost Guide What an Access Control Board Includes An access control board is the controller that sits between a card reader, a lock and a management system. On the board you typically find a reader interface such as Wiegand or OSDP, a microcontroller…

FR4 vs High-Frequency PCB Stack-Up: Key Differences What Changes as Frequency Rises At low frequency, a trace is just a wire and the laminate is just a mechanical carrier. Above roughly a few hundred megahertz that stops being true. The signal concentrates near the conductor surface, so copper roughness and…

Smoke Detector Module PCB: Design, Manufacturing and Applications What the Board Has to Do A smoke detector is one of the few electronic products that must work after ten years of neglect, in a dusty ceiling, with a battery that cannot be recharged. The board has to run a sensor,…

Face Recognition System PCB: Design, Materials and Manufacturing What the Board Has to Do A face recognition terminal is a complete edge computing product. It captures an image from a camera, runs a neural network to detect and match a face, drives infrared illumination for operation in low light, stores…